Lloyd Kaufman

Lloyd Kaufman not only co-founded the cult horror studio Troma Entertainment, he is in many ways the face of the company. A gleeful huckster in the grand drive-in tradition of William Castle and Roger Corman, who knows that selling a movie is as important as making a movie, Kaufman is a regular presence at comic book and horror conventions even when his studio has no new product to flog. Kaufman fell into low-budget filmmaking in the late 1960s while attending Yale University, where he directed an experimental student film called "The Girl Who Returned." Upon graduation, he began working for the low-budget studio Cannon Films, where he worked on respected indie hits like John G. Avildsen's hippie-murder drama "Joe" while writing, producing, directing and starring in his own independent films. (During this period, Kaufman also produced and directed a handful of adult movies under pseudonyms.) Kaufman and creative partner Michael Herz founded Troma Entertainment in 1974, specializing at first in grindhouse sex comedies, but in the mid-1980s, satiric horror movies with deliberately outrageous gross-out shocks and a defiantly low-budget feel were Troma's bread and butter, resulting in Kaufman-directed (often under the name Samuel Weil) underground hits like "The Toxic Avenger" and "Class of Nuke 'Em High." Later films like "Troma's War" and "Tromeo and Juliet" apply the same sardonic aesthetic to different film genres. Along with producing its own films, Troma also acquires and distributes low-budget shock and exploitation films, both current and historical.